Planning for Coastal Resilience: Best Practices for Calamitous Times

By Timothy Beatley

Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency and magnitude of coastal storms around the globe, and the anticipated rise of sea levels will have enormous impact on fragile and vulnerable coastal regions. In the U.S., more than 50% of the population inhabits coastal areas. In Planning for Coastal Resilience, Tim Beatley argues that, in the face of such threats, all future coastal planning and management must reflect a commitment to the concept of resilience. In this timely book, he writes that coastal resilience must become the primary design and planning principle to guide all future development and all future infrastructure decisions.
Resilience, Beatley explains, is a profoundly new way of viewing coastal infrastructure—an approach that values smaller, decentralized kinds of energy, water, and transport more suited to the serious physical conditions coastal communities will likely face. Implicit in the notion is an emphasis on taking steps to build adaptive capacity, to be ready ahead of a crisis or disaster. It is anticipatory, conscious, and intentional in its outlook.
After defining and explaining coastal resilience, Beatley focuses on what it means in practice. Resilience goes beyond reactive steps to prevent or handle a disaster. It takes a holistic approach to what makes a community resilient, including such factors as social capital and sense of place. Beatley provides case studies of five U.S. coastal communities, and “resilience profiles” of six North American communities, to suggest best practices and to propose guidelines for increasing resilience in threatened communities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jun 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781610911429

Timothy Beatley

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia's School of Architecture and is the author of several books, including Ethical Land Use: Principles of Policy and Planning.

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INTRODUCTION

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Climate Change and Coastal Resilience

WE ARE DRAWN, IT SEEMS, EMOTIONALLY and economically, to the edge of land, where sea and sand meet, and where terra firma gives way to the vastness of ocean and marine habitats. Coastal environments are highly productive ecologically, and historically we have been interested in them as a matter of navigational and commercial necessity. The very history of this nation began with coastal cities like Boston, New York, and Charleston—places that offered economic opportunities and facilitated the settlement and growth of the nation as a whole. We are drawn, moreover, to coastal environments for their beauty, mystery, and wonder, and we should not minimize the emotional value and connectedness we derive from these places. However, in light of current trends and future pressures, we will have to find new ways to live in and with the coast, new ways of reconciling the desire to be near it with the cautious humility and respect for the dangers a changing climate will present. Our coastal management strategy increasingly will need to be based less on armoring, less on conventional large-project infrastructure, and more on resilience and adaptability.

As the full effects of climate change become manifest, coastal cities and regions will face a range of increasingly severe challenges. To effectively plan for and respond to these challenges will require new ways of thinking and working. This book argues that all future coastal planning and management must reflect a commitment to the concept of resilience. Indeed coastal resilience must become the primary design and planning principle that guides all future development and all future growth and infrastructure decisions.

Climate change is perhaps our planet’s gravest threat and challenge, and coastal communities are where the full brunt and impact of the predicted physical changes will be the greatest. The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2007, paints a dire and calamitous future, with special impacts for coastal environments. Average global temperatures have already risen 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) since the industrial period began, but much more is in store. If we continue down the business as usual path of heavy reliance on fossil fuels, we are likely to see temperatures increase by some 7 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century (IPCC 2007a, 13). The implications for coastal communities and regions are severe and many. Sea levels have already been rising (the Atlantic coast has experienced about 1 foot [ca. 0.33 meter] of increase over the last hundred years), with higher rates likely. The IPCC predicts that global sea levels will rise between 7 inches and 1.9 feet (0.18–0.58 meter) by the end of the twenty-first century (IPCC, 2007a, 13); many, however, believe these estimates to be conservative, and not fully reflective of the dynamics of glacial and ice shelf melting. The signals there are not very positive, with substantial increases in the extent of summer melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet in recent years. The news from Canada has also not been good: the problem of its shrinking ice shelves was given further urgency by the dramatic breaking off of the massive Markham Ice Shelf in August 2008. While even conservative predictions of sea level rise are worrisome, when the potential effects of melting—especially of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets—are taken into account, an even more catastrophic sea level rise—on the order of multiple meters—must be confronted. Jim Hansen, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies argues that, based on Earth’s history, a 25-meter (82-foot) sea level rise is conceivable, given what we know about sea levels 3 million years ago (the last time it was as hot as it will likely be under the business-as-usual scenario; see, e.g., Hansen 2007). Perhaps Hansen is overly pessimistic (and overcompensating for what he believes is the inherent conservatism of science), but the scenario is clearly within the realm of possibility. Even a few meters’ sea level rise will have dramatic impacts on our coastlines, coastal commerce, and way of life.

Sea level rise is, of course, not the only impact of climate change that coastal communities need to anticipate. There is increasingly reliable evidence that the frequency and magnitude of coastal storms and hurricanes will rise. A recent study by researchers at Florida State University, for instance, concludes that the strongest tropical cyclones, as measured by wind speeds, are getting ever stronger over time (FSU 2008). The increase in wind speed is likely a function of the heat energy effects of warming sea waters, but it suggests that coastal planners must anticipate and plan for even more difficult preparedness, evacuation, and damage loss scenarios. More people and property as well as environmental and community assets will be impacted by these events, and coastal leaders must be ready. Stronger, more frequent hurricanes and coastal storms will challenge the normalcy of coastal living and cause immense economic, social, and environmental disruption.

Coastal communities will be forced to simultaneously plan for and tackle the potentially episodic and catastrophic effects of larger, more frequent storms while moving expeditiously to address longer-term adaptations to a changing climate—for example, moving back from shorelines; moving up and out of the most dangerous coastal locations; and preparing for heat waves, water shortages, and increased air pollution. The agenda is daunting: planners must keep in mind and move forward on multiple serious challenges that also must be tracked on different time scales. Resiliency offers a useful framework, as this book argues, for integrating these different challenges with policy and planning agendas.

These significant changes in physical dangers are accompanied by urbanization patterns and population and development pressures that are placing ever more people and property in harm’s way. Because these development patterns impact and disrupt the ecological patterns of natural systems, the ability of coastal environments to mitigate and absorb the likely impacts of flooding, storms, and sea level rise is lessened, further contributing to increasing levels of coastal vulnerability. The replacement of wetlands, forests, and farm fields with roadways, rooftops, and impervious urban hardscapes is a recipe for increased coastal flooding. At precisely the time when coastal communities and regions need to take advantage of the full mitigative benefits and resilience values provided by healthy ecological systems, these systems have been degraded and diminished.

Coastal communities have always faced formidable preparedness and disaster management issues—for example, when to call for evacuation in the face of an impending hurricane or tropical storm, and ensuring that the necessary roadways and infrastructure to permit such an evacuation are in place. In addition, many coastal communities have faced pressing environmental resource management problems, such as ensuring adequate water supply and protecting the water quality in bay, estuarine, and nearshore coastal waters. These matters have been perennial concerns and planning and management challenges, of course, but climate change promises to profoundly expand and exacerbate these problems.

While the image of a small coastal resort community is an accurate one along many parts of the U.S. coast, coastal management is more often a matter of dealing with the problems of coastal cities and dense urban settlements. Normal urban problems—such as air pollution; excessive highway construction and car dependence; waste management; and the massive challenges of delivering a host of services and infrastructure from energy to wastewater collection, wastewater treatment, and water supply—become even more severe and more pressing when the likely impacts of climate change are added to them. There is evidence, for instance, that ozone levels in coastal cities like New York will increase in response to rising temperatures along the East Coast. Heat waves and periods of severe drought will exacerbate both water supply and water quality issues. The higher summer temperatures that eastern coastal cities will face raise significant public health and safety concerns, especially for the elderly (a growing demographic category). Climate change in the face of increasing urbanization threatens to exacerbate all these problems as well as to introduce new ones.

The problem of designing and planning coastal cities in the face of climate change is a daunting one. Evidence suggests that coastal cities around the world are growing faster than their noncoastal counterparts and are already denser. A combination of sharp increases in coastal urbanization and population growth and increasingly severe climate events will place ever more people at risk. A recent global analysis of population patterns estimates that there are 634 million people living in locations less than 10 meters (33 feet) above sea level. According to McGranahan, Balk, and Anderson (2007, 22) 10 percent of the world’s population lives within these so-called low-elevation coastal zone (LECZ) areas, which amount to but 2 percent of the world’s land. While the percentage of the U.S. population living in such especially high-risk zones is lower than the percentage of the corresponding population in many other countries (e.g., consider Bangladesh and Vietnam, with 46 percent and 55 percent respectively), the absolute number of people and the extent of the land area vulnerable are very large indeed (about 22.8 million people and 235,000 square kilometers [ca. 90,000 square miles]). The United States has the third-largest amount of land below this 10-meter (33-foot) level (preceded only by Russia and Canada; see McGranahan, Balk, and Anderson 2007, 29).

That there are tremendous economic ramifications to these trends and predictions is an understatement. The U.S. coastline contains billions of dollars in property and infrastructure. A recent study (Nicholls et al. 2007) of the likely increased flood damages in port cities around the world finds a striking increase in assets and wealth at risk: the study estimates that, globally, coastal assets at risk from a 100-year coastal flood will be some $35 trillion by 2070, up from $3 trillion in 2007. This more than tenfold increase does not bode well for the viability of future coastal economies around the world.

There is good news and bad about the capability of U.S. coastal states and communities to tackle these challenges in the future. The bad news is that most planners, engineers, and coastal officials are still in denial about the severity of the challenges and that relatively few state or local plans have taken sea level rise into account. To put an optimistic slant on the current state of affairs, coastal America is poised to begin to take on these difficult problems; and as the politics continues to change in favor of addressing climate change, it will become easier to make real progress.

The good news is that most Americans appear to believe that climate change is real, and a vast majority believe that actions to address climate change are needed. Other good news is that many of the steps and actions needed to move coastal jurisdictions toward greater resilience will also enhance long-term livability and quality of life in these places and can already be strongly justified on economic and environmental grounds. Conserving and restoring coastal ecosystems, for instance, will enhance resilience but will also yield many other benefits (e.g., biodiversity, recreation, tourism). Designing homes, schools, and offices so that they are survivable and livable in the aftermath of a hurricane means that they will also require less energy to operate, be less costly to heat and cool, and yield living and work environments (e.g., by incorporating natural daylight and natural ventilation) that are more enjoyable and productive. Strengthening social networks will make a community more resilient but will also result in richer human relationships, a stronger sense of community, and potentially greater meaning in life, all things that are intrinsically valuable. The agenda of resilient coastal communities need not be viewed as a bleak or burdensome one, but rather as a profoundly positive vision that holds great promise for improving the quality and experience of coastal living.

The resilience advocated here has many constituent elements and implies many different planning tools and policies. It suggests a profoundly new way of viewing coastal infrastructure—a new approach that values smaller, decentralized kinds of energy, water, and transport more suited to the dangerous physical conditions coastal communities will likely face. It suggests new ways of understanding community sustainability—arguing that sustaining, nurturing, and restoring coastal environments will be one of the essential planks in resilience, and that sustaining and nurturing a sense of community will be equally important. The new coastal resilience will require concerted work on the natural and built environments, and on the social, economic, and political ones as well.

What coastal resilience means in practice and on the ground is the main topic of this book. The other positive news is that there are now a number of hopeful stories, successful coastal planning and management cases, and a variety of tested tools and techniques for addressing the challenges faced. Coastal resilience will in practice likely require a creative mix of many different approaches: shoreline retreat and land use planning, greenhouse gas mitigation actions, and adaptations to climate change. As this book describes, there will be other strategies besides the obvious ones related to planning and physical design. In part, the task will involve ensuring that neighborhoods and communities prepare for and organize around these new threats, and that there are institutions and social capital to permit patterns of sharing, helping, and cooperation. The task will largely be about how to facilitate and grow resilient communities and neighborhoods and how to foster patterns of helpful relationships and interpersonal